Tim Ferriss On The 4-Hour Chef

Tim Ferriss On His Latest Book & How He Is So Wildly Productive

Quick Bio

Timothy Ferriss is hungry. It’s Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, four days before the launch of his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life, and Ferriss hasn’t eaten much all day. The 35-year-old bestselling author, he of The 4-Hour Workweek fame, has been too busy with book launch warfare. (He’s battling U.S. retail booksellers, but more on that later.) And considering this is his “cheat day” -- anyone who read his last book, The 4-Hour Body, knows that means it's his day to eat anything and everything he wants -- Ferriss is on a mission to find food. “I’m in search of calories. I’m hunting and gathering,” he says over the phone and laughs.

As he fields the call from AskMen to discuss his new book, his thoughts on happiness and why his osso buco recipe may be the best thing since sliced bread, he lands at a Japanese restaurant and places his order: green tea, seaweed salad, sashimi and brown rice. Um, cheat day? “The brown rice is a bit of a cheat. This is just my warm-up,” he says. “I actually passed a bakery on my way here. On my way back I’ll grab one or two chocolate croissants. I love those things.” With calories in sight, Ferriss can focus on the task at hand: our questions. Onward.

Let’s chat about the boycott. Barnes & Noble and nearly every retailer in the U.S. has said they won’t carry your book because they can’t sell it online, seeing as your publisher, Amazon, has the rights. What are your thoughts on the whole thing?

Tim Ferriss: I think it’s a silly battle. They view me wrongly as the make-it-or-break-it future of digital. And that’s just not accurate. Even if Amazon Publishing closes its doors tomorrow, it wouldn’t have any effect on consumer demand for digital. I think it’s an emotional response that really isn’t going to do anything to save their businesses at the end of the day. If they wanted to save their businesses, they should do it over the next few years and this is a book they could make a lot of money with. It’s unfortunate from that perspective, but I get it. On the flip side, I knew there was going to be a lot of blowback, so it’s given me an opportunity to really be at the forefront of all this stuff, like the partnership with BitTorrent.It’s a bit more frenetic than any other launch I’ve done. It’s almost back to square one, being boycotted and banned by almost every retailer in the country. I’m having to dig back into my roots to be really scrappy with the trench warfare stuff.

So how did you decide on cooking as your next big adventure?

TF: My readers have been asking me for a book on accelerated learning for five years now, and I’ve been hunting for the perfect context. At the same time, I had developed this digital malaise. I would shut my laptop each day and no matter how much I did, I felt like I had nothing to show for it. I wanted to use my thumbs for something besides the space bar.I started thinking about my dad and my grandfather, and they could repair cars, build tables, repair basic wiring. We can’t do any of that stuff. It started causing this angst for me that I wasn’t physically creating anything.I was watching my girlfriend cook dinner at one point and it just struck me that cooking was perfect for a few reasons. No. 1: I’m going to eat anyway, so it’s the perfect opportunity. Secondly, because cooking kicked my ass many times in the past, I’d quit many times. It was the perfect skill to use to show people how I go from ground zero to much better at the end of the journey. Lastly, even if you never cook, after a week of experimenting, because the kitchen involves all five senses, it’s like the perfect dojo of human potential. Once you follow half a dozen or a dozen experiments in cooking, your experience of food goes from a black and white, tiny screen to Imax, a million colors, 3D. That actually translates to everything.

This book seems to be quite a bit more focused than your others; it’s all food, all the time, with an added dash of how to master things like three-point shots and knot-tying. Was that purposeful?

TF: I really try to make each book better than the one before it. I wanted to give people the choose-your-own-adventure, sort of all-you-can-eat menu, like I did in The 4-Hour Body, but I also wanted to give people a really clear, logical and fun progression in the way I think The 4-Hour Workweek was perhaps better done. I wanted to take the best of both worlds and put it into The 4-Hour Chef.The other piece of this is that, in college, I paid a lot of my bills through two jobs: I was a paid illustrator and I was a bouncer. The bouncer has nothing to do with food. But the illustration I had stopped maybe 12 years ago, when I graduated from school. This book was an opportunity for me to reclaim that because I wanted to create a beautiful book, but I also wanted to create a visual story. As much as I love digital -- and this is the hysterical thing about the work with Amazon -- I designed this book to be the optimal teaching and visual experience, as a two-page-spread-at-a-time book, and you just don’t have that in digital.

The 4-Hour Chef is your third book that seems to equate productivity in life with happiness in life. Is that one of your beliefs?

TF: I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things. Workaholics typically have a lot of achievement with very little appreciation of what they have, whether it’s cars or friendships or otherwise. That is a shallow victory. Then you have people with a lot of appreciation and no achievement, which is fine, but it doesn’t create a lot of good in the world.So, for me, speaking personally, at least, I want to have as much achievement and as much appreciation as possible. And food is a wonderful way of fine-tuning yourself for both of those. If you want to try to predict success of a marriage or someone’s general level of happiness, you can look at how often they have long dinners with loved ones or close friends.